London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, London's successful bid to host the Games was premised on a shared view across all the parties and both Houses that they should be about much more than 60 days of Olympic and Paralympic sport.

At Second Reading, we talked about bringing desperately needed jobs and inward investment to London and the local area and the hope that a successful Games would generate a sense of national renewal whereby after the Games, communities up and down the country would be more optimistic and ambitious about their futures and would have a greater belief in the possibilities of their own achievements. The interest in tickets for the Games and the burgeoning media interest in the organising of the Games and the progress of our athletes bodes well. It would be a great pity if we did not in the event manage to use the Games to transform our economy, our culture and our environment in permanent and beneficial ways.

The previous Government published their legacy plans via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Legacy Promises document in 2007. The five promises were: to make the UK a world-leading sporting nation, to transform the heart of east London, to inspire a generation of young people to take part in local volunteering, cultural and physical activity, to make the Olympic park a blueprint for sustainable living and to demonstrate the UK as a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, visit and for business. It would be hard to give concrete figures or targets for any of those promises but can the Minister update us on the progress that her Government are making towards achieving those targets?

On making the UK a world-leading sporting nation, the previous Government pledged to use the power of the Games to inspire a million more people to play sport three or more times a week.

A second pledge, to be delivered through the Department of Health, promised to get 1 million more people doing more general physical activity. We gather that both those targets have been dropped. Is that the case? If so, what are the targets now? The latest Sport England figures that I can find, from April 2011, seem very disappointing. They show that 17 sports have recorded a decline in the number of people playing once a week since 2007-08 and only four, mountaineering, athletics, netball and table tennis, have recorded a significant increase.

Could the Minister also update us on the progress of the Cultural Olympiad? We gather that the programme is about to be announced, so perhaps she could give us a glimpse of the performances and activities that will put flesh on the aspiration to demonstrate that the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, visit and for business.

On the Olympic park, part of the East End of London has been transformed from a contaminated wasteland into what has been described as the largest urban park to be created in Europe for 150 years. You cannot but be impressed by what has been achieved and by the plans for the sustainable community that are now coming to fruition. It is clear that the housing and retail developments there are radically improving the economic profile of the five boroughs. However, can the Minister explain in more detail the implications for the Government of the decision to pull out of negotiations to sell the stadium to West Ham football club? Where have the capital funds come from for this, given that, as we learnt from the February 2011 NAO report, the ODA’s contingency fund is almost fully committed, and also given the NAO’s concern in the same report that there should be a clear plan for mitigating the costs of maintaining any assets for which the ODA remains responsible after the Games, in the event that the legacy company is unsuccessful in its procurement of long-run operators? Who will meet the long-run costs of this part of the site, going forward? I beg to move.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I tried to get my name down to this amendment, because this is a very important debate. I am afraid that I managed to mess that process up, as I did when I tried to draft an amendment for a similar type of discussion.

The idea that this Olympics went beyond purely the Games themselves is a very good aspiration. However, it has proved fairly difficult to deliver. To be perfectly honest, it seems that the more the Government are involved in those aims, the worse we have done. I use the word “Government” to mean the Treasury Bench and whoever is in charge. When the Olympic movement itself was in charge, it brought more concrete and sustainable things and seemed to do rather better. That is the impression that I have at the moment.

We had targets under the previous Government and we had arguments about double accounting and what it meant. One thing that we may discover from this is the limitations of government involvement to achieve certain things. Looking at this we can get some idea of what we can and cannot achieve, with reasonable levels of effort, and we will be able to take something very valuable away with us for the next time we have a huge event. The Olympics is the ultimate pan-national event. We have learnt from the delivery of various things what went wrong in Athens and right in Sydney, et cetera. The fact that we can pass this information on to the next cities to host the Games will be a good thing. If government piggybacks on the Olympics to achieve something, we should know what has and has not been achieved.

I suggest that we could go on with this matter for some considerable time. The questions raised in the amendment are quite profound as regards what has happened in the Olympics and where we go, and the relative successes and failures that there will be in the process. When I was trying to draw up an amendment, without getting too complicated or esoteric, I might have excluded paragraph (c) from the discussion, for the simple reason that it will be easy to judge that matter, and most of the activity there seems to have been reasonably successful.

Once again, I think this is a question about what government can achieve and cannot achieve. I would hope that, for instance, the first beneficiary of this information would probably be Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games, and all future Games. It is very easy to forget that there has to be a continuum, a legacy; it is not just a one-off event. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some idea about the government thinking as regards their involvement, learning lessons and backing up successes and not repeating failures.